'Curious Incident' offers rats their moment in spotlight

'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time' rats at the Oriental Theatre in Chicago.

Morgan GreeneChicago Tribune

From the grubby, self-serving Templeton in "Charlotte's Web" to the "1984" rats that carried out Big Brother's deeds in Room 101, rats in pop culture have a bad rep. Then there's the real-life trash-eating football-sized devils that roam Chicago's streets. Pizza rat. The Black Plague.

Poor rats. Where are their unsung heroes?

They're scurrying on to the stage of the Oriental Theatre in Chicago. Because they were hired as professional actors in a Broadway national tour.

Meet Zeus and Jinkies, currently sharing the role of Toby on the road in "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," the Tony-winning play based on Mark Haddon's 2003 book about an unsolved mystery undertaken by Christopher, a teen on the autism spectrum, whose trusty sidekick happens to be his pet rat.

Jinkies is a year old. Zeus will turn 1 this month. They are fancy rats, bred and domesticated ratatouille-less Remys of the stage, gnawing their way through a rat-phobic world to achieve dreams bigger than their fat, scaly tails. Before a Friday night show, they're hanging out in their shared dressing room with animal handler Cara Kilduff and Adam Langdon, who plays Christopher.

Langdon is used to their star power. He was prepped by his Broadway predecessor Alex Sharp to expect the rats to get more attention.

"He was like 'I would come in and look at the press board and there would be two or three things for me and then like 20 things for the rats,'" says Langdon. "Always way more popular."

Kilduff places a mix of tomatoes, frozen peas, watermelon and chicken in their two-story enclosure, the Mercedes of cages, which has a tunnel, an oversized fleece rat hammock, and little sticks and toys to chew on to curb their ever-growing teeth.

"These guys, they have a good life," she says. "They are spoiled rotten. Their meals come regularly. My boss made fun of me because she's like, 'You boiled chicken for them?' And I was like, 'No. I didn't boil chicken. I gently simmered organic chicken.' She rolled her eyes and was like, 'Just get out of my office.'"

The show vet recently told Kilduff: "They're very healthy rats."

Kristen Norman / for the Chicago Tribune

Cara Kilduff, animal wrangler for "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," with Zeus, one of the starring rats, before a performance at the Oriental Theatre.

Cara Kilduff, animal wrangler for "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," with Zeus, one of the starring rats, before a performance at the Oriental Theatre. (Kristen Norman / for the Chicago Tribune)

Zeus once betrayed poor Jinkies in one of the first matinees, refusing to leave the cage, but has since accepted his responsibility as lead show rat. Neither appears to be the Eve Harrington type.

Kilduff explains that rats do better in pairs. She refers to them as "the boys" and says they're actually incredibly clean, smart, cuddly and absolutely do not have bubonic plague. Sometimes they wrestle. When they're really happy, they grind their teeth together, called bruxing, and their eyes bug-out, called boggling. They're kind of like little dogs.

Langdon pipes in: "They do a lot of sleeping."

"Older males, they're like, lazy," agrees Kilduff. "And I have a wheel for them and the breeder was like, 'Well, that's cool.' And she wasn't enthusiastic. And I was like, 'But it's for them to exercise.' And she was like, 'Well. You just bought them another bed.'"

They can also be mischievous.

Kilduff noticed Zeus and Jinkies pack-ratting their bedding in a specific corner of the cage, where a puppy involved in the show would stick its head whenever Kilduff would open the door to clean the cage. The next time the pup shoved her head there, the rat's nest awaited.

"So she had a blue afro on her head," says Kilduff. "And she did it two days in a row. I swear to god these guys (the rats) were like, 'Ha ha ha ha!'"

The boys have finished eating, for the moment. Jinkies crawls back into the hammock, seemingly overwhelmed by the dressing room crowd.

Zeus ends up on Kilduff's shoulder.

"He'll come out and he'll lay there and he'll look at me," says Kilduff about the all-knowing Zeus' pre-show ritual. "And I always say the same thing. I'm like, 'Come on, let's go do that thing we do.' And he climbs in the cage himself," referring to the prop that goes out on stage.

"Sometimes he's a little sleepy," says Langdon. "I talk really, really loudly and I feel bad, because I know that in the cage the vibrations are just like buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh. So he takes the little blanket that's laid out and he wraps himself in it … and you can't see him anymore."

"And when I take him offstage I'm like, 'What did you do?!' says Kilduff.

After the show, Zeus goes right to his water bottle and eats some more organic treats. And then he gets ready to do it all again.

Zeus and Jinkies will hit the road after Christmas, en route to Connecticut. Kilduff will have to endure their nocturnal hotel room antics.

"It's always Jinkies who flips the food bowl," she says. "Actually, what I really want to do is next time we have a bathroom, I want to fill up the sink with water and make a swimming pool for them. Because rats swim so I want to see if they'll swim, if they would like it. I'll get little towels for them."

Kilduff says she's 95 percent sure she's going to take them with her when the tour's finished and see if she can extend their projected 3-year life span with top-notch care.

Hopefully they will meet a more natural end than their New York predecessor Rose, a rescued rat who died in a tragic fall only four days after making her Broadway debut.

May she rest in peace.

As curtain approaches, Zeus and Jinkies, now curled up together in the hammock with their noses sticking out of parallel corners, look like happy little rat kings. Soon Zeus will take the stage, aided by silent support squeals from his backstage rat bud, and once again make the case for the valiant rodent.

It really is a rat's world. We're all just living in it.

Zeus the rat plays in his cage backstage at "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" at the Oriental Theatre.

Zeus the rat plays in his cage backstage at "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" at the Oriental Theatre.